The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Performing Arts (SCFPA) opened this week with nearly 400 entrants, youth and adults, who will demonstrate their musical abilities to impartial adjudicators during a three-week period. It's a far cry from the original 30 music students who once gathered at Gibsons United Church in 1973 for the first music festival.
Terry Andrews, mother of two exceptional musical talents, Mark and Neal, remembers how she got involved 25 years ago.
"His music teacher forced me," she laughs.
Mark's teacher, the late Jesse Morrison, who taught the renowned James and Jon Kimura Parker, felt that Mark was ready to play in front of an audience at the astonishing age of two years and 10 months - surely the youngest festival participant ever. As a parent, Terry did as many others, sat and waited for her children or worked behind the scenes while Mark earned accolades during the early festivals. She continues to volunteer, calling herself "just a typist," but festival president Sue Milne refers to her as "our dedicated volunteer program and syllabus co-ordinator."
Mark has since gone on to graduate from the University of Toronto piano performance program, while brother Neal will enrol in a college in Michigan this year on a full scholarship to study trumpet.
Milne became president of the SCFPA in 2005 and presides over this 35th celebration during her fourth and final year as president. She describes it as "the best volunteer position on the Coast - especially to see talented young performers mature over the past eight years." When she and husband John arrived on the Coast in 1999, they responded to an ad in the paper from former president Lois Fishleigh who asked for volunteers for the 2000 Festival.
"We weren't sure whether it was a Kiwanis-type festival for amateurs and students or a festival for professionals," she said. "I'd been involved in starting the Ottawa Kiwanis Dance Festival in the '80s and John had been a volunteer for the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival."
They both worked that year as secretaries to the adjudicators. Milne notes how much the event has grown. Even in the last four years, the number of entries has increased by 25 per cent. When organizers count up the number of choir and band participants involved in the 400 entries, the accumulated number of performers could be up to 900 people.
Vocalist Jo Hammond remembers the first time she entered the music festival, as it was then called, singing three solo songs. She had just begun lessons at age 39 with local teacher Lyn Vernon, and Jo's daughter Patricia attended in a stroller to watch her mother perform in the Elphinstone Secondary School gym. In later years, her mother would, in turn, watch her daughter perform in many festivals on piano and continue to a singing career in London. One year, mother and daughter sang together - a duet from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem, "Pie Jesu."
Jo Hammond served on the festival committee for about 10 years starting in 1981. She recalls that many of the Coast's piano teachers were also on the committee, including Betty Kennet and Pat Stuart. They met at Barb Cattanach's house to discuss finances, venues, rules, dates, scheduling and the important question - who to hire as adjudicators to give impartial critique to the students.
Driven entirely by volunteers, the festival flourished. Strings were added to the piano and vocal/choral categories, then percussion/woodwinds/brass. In 2005, the SCFPA introduced electronic and acoustic categories in recognition of youth interest in modern music, then in 2007, folk instrumental and classical dance.
Besides the Andrews brothers and Hammond, many other students went on to professional careers in music, for example, Achilles (Ikie) Ziakris, one of Kennet's students, earned his degree at University of British Columbia in piano, then became professor of performing arts at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ont.
Patricia Hammond remembers there was a surprising feeling of camaraderie among the students at the Music Festival. Classical musicians were teased at school.
"So despite the fact that it was a competition," she writes from London, "it was wonderful to find ourselves in a different setting, all of us suddenly honest about our secret passion and even given a chance to be proud of excelling at it!"
She regards the festival as vitally important.
"Nothing approaches the excitement of performing for an audience and being given a chance to win a precious wooden trophy to hang on your wall. And least anyone think it was all about prizes, it's soon apparent that the only way you can get that piece of wood is to love the music and to show others how much you love it."
The festival's piano encore concert is on Sunday, April 20, at 1:30 p.m. at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. The festival highlights concert, at which many trophies and bursaries are awarded, takes place on Sunday, May 4, at 2 p.m. at the Raven's Cry Theatre in Sechelt. Admission to all festival 2008 events is by donation. See www.coastfestival.com for more.
